If one were to ask a representative of a Catholic adoption agency why they were unwilling to consider gay couples as possible adoptive parents for the children in their care, it is more than likely that their reply would begin with the words “the church teaches…”. It may seem strange therefore that the letter of the Anglican archbishops to the government in support of their right to take this position should refer to “the dictates of personal conscience”, and to the importance of recognising the “rights” of objectors to gay adoption.

What Catholic opponents of gay adoption are espousing is first of all a doctrinal position, which we may choose to identify as homophobic (an instance of “structural” homophobia, if one wishes) without thereby abandoning ourselves to speculation concerning the psychosexual makeup of individual upholders of the faith. But in fact it is in this very elision of “teaching” and “conscience” that the scandal of “religion” resides: the scandal of a heteronomy, which is fundamentally incompatible with the liberal vision of a public sphere composed of discrete choice-making individuals.

Consider Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s observation of the “exact analogy” between the confession of the Nazi who says “my conscience is Adolf Hitler” and that of the Christian who says “my conscience is Jesus Christ”:

We can now understand that the great change takes place at the moment when the unity of human existence ceases to consist in its autonomy and is found, through the miracle of faith, beyond the man’s own ego and its law, in Jesus Christ. The form of this change in the point of unity has an exact analogy in the secular sphere. When the national socialist says ‘My conscience is Adolf Hitler’ that, too, is an attempt to find a foundation for the unity of his own ego somewhere beyond himself. The consequence of this is the surrender of one’s autonomy for the sake of an unconditional heteronomy, and this in turn is possible only if the other man, the man to whom I look for the unity of my life, fulfils the function of a redeemer for me.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, ed. Eberhard Bethge, trans. Neville Horton Smith (London: Fontana 1964), p. 243

The difference between the two is the difference between the imitation of Hitler and the imitation of Christ. If Hitler “fulfils the function of a redeemer” for the Nazi, it is by delivering him from the inconsistency and ruin of his personal conscience and re-founding his identity on a certain vision of integrity and power, as embodied by the Führer. It is precisely this vision that Father Carlo, in Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers, is referring to when he informs his Nazi prisoner Liebeneiner that “A Nazi in pain is in a situation for which his faith has not prepared him”:

It was only after a full month of beneficient torture that Liebeneiner began to see that his place was with the victims and that a philosophy of brutal overlordship availed him nothing in his sufferings. He had a vision of Adolf Hitler crucified - naked, with a creampuff paunch, quiff and little moustache intact, crying out Eli Eli lama sabacthani? The image was, of course, absurd. Hitler was by definition not one of the crucifiable. Yet he, Liebeneiner, faithful servant of the Führer, had been granted by the Führer no metaphysical or theological defence against agony of the body and humiliation of the soul. The Führer had let him down.

Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers (London: Penguin 1981), pp. 449-450.

(Burgess, lapsed Catholic, appears to attribute to the catechism the same power to ward off psychic collapse that C. S. Lewis accords to a firm grounding in the Classics…). The Nazi’s “unconditional heteronomy” is meant to place him in the position of the uncrucifiable: he may voluntarily and heroically sacrifice his life for the Fatherland, but he will henceforth be immune to the distress of humiliation. (In one of the novel’s numerous heavy-handed ironies, Liebeneiner once broken becomes the devout advocate of a “systematic democracy and systematic free moral choice”, with which it is the destiny of Germany to civilize the world).

Christ’s action as a redeemer is somewhat different (although you would never guess from the lyrics of some contemporary worship songs). The conscience of the Christian whose conscience is Christ is not a conscience becalmed by the certainty of its own righteousness; rather it is consciousness of sin, of the necessary failure of integrity. Bonhoeffer writes that “[Christ] sets conscience free even and especially when man enters into the fellowship of human guilt”. Once it is known that I cannot be with integrity what I most wish to be, I am released from the tyranny of my own ego-ideal: I can lay down the “heavy burden of justification” and give myself to what Bonhoeffer calls “the venture of responsible action” in which neither the outcome nor my having-been-right-all-along is certain.

Those who would acclaim Bonhoeffer as a heroic Christian martyr are thus in a sense missing the point here: the theological stakes of Bonhoeffer’s actions in opposition to the Nazi state are more clearly identified if we regard his subsequent murder by that state as senseless obscenity rather than sacramental vindication. Intrinsic to the notion of “the venture of responsible action” is that such a venture may be botched; it may come to grief; it may end with one’s dying, as Geoffrey Hill says, “alone, and in ugliness”.

Now, the question addressed by the archbishops’ letter is whether or not the state should use its legal authority, backed implicitly by all the violence of which it is capable, to compel Catholics whose conscience is in accord with the teachings of their church to contravene those teachings. As I have already suggested, individual conscience is not entirely what is at issue here: one doubts that the voices of Canterbury and York would be nearly so loudly raised against the legal disciplining of “rogue” homophobes without a credo to back them up.

In spite of its being couched in the language of liberal tolerance, the archbishops’ letter is not particularly concerned with defending the autonomous consciences of individual participants in the liberal agora. The “right” with which it is most urgently concerned is a paradoxical “right to heteronomy”: the right to locate one’s “conscience” outside the public domain of opinion and negotiation (itself more or less explicitly modelled on the market), to identify intransigently with one’s “faith position”.

It is just here that I want to call upon Bonhoeffer’s distinction between the two modes of heteronomy, the heteronomy which justifies and enslaves and the heteronomy which accuses and liberates. These two modes are formally indiscernible within the lexicon of rights employed by the archbishops: a “right to heteronomy” would honour them both without distinction. It would be a cheap - and ultimately impotent - polemical move to associate the doctrinal positions of the Catholic church with the “wrong” kind of heteronomy; nevertheless, there are occasions when the claims of “conscience” are indeed those of a distinction between the clean and the dirty, the justified and the damned, which admits of no “fellowship of human guilt”. Increasingly in the debate over homosexuality within the Anglican church it seems that the de facto authority is wielded by those who are most willing to arrogate it to themselves, and that the defence of religious conviction qua heteronomy is bereft of the conceptual resources to identify and repudiate an attempt to create, and impose, a new category of the crucifiable.